> How can sparseness be communicated?
In my soap library (ZSI; http://www.zolera.com/resources/opensrc/zsi),
it's meta-data the application feeds to the serializer.
As Jacek said, it's an *application* thing, not a SOAP thing. SOAP just
knows that there is data that has a "position" attribute.
> Why say 'types are good' and then say 'indicating sparseness is not
> necessary'?
I don't hold that position. It is only because of the fragility of
current implementations, I believe, that typing is dominant. Once we
get dedicated clients talking to dedicated servers then typing should
melt away. It's only because right now we're generally doing things
with all-purposes clients and servers, and we want to debug our
implementations, that typing is included. Sparseness isn't a type, it's
an attribute of data that an application CAN feed to its SOAP library so
that a data-transfer optimization *that the application on the other
side is expecting* can be performed.
/r$
--
Zolera Systems, Securing web services (XML, SOAP, Signatures,
Encryption)
http://www.zolera.com